[Foundation-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Despite growing pains, users hope for dominance of Wiktionary, Mediawiki

[Erik Moeller]

Sj-
> Yesterday, the O'Reilly Network's Scott Hacker addressed the end-user
> experience of setting up and customizing a wiki (with some eloquent
> commentary by visitors at the end) :
> _Where's the Movable Type of the Wiki World?_    (
> http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/5794 )

> Hacker suggests the Wiki world needs its own elegant, soup-to-nuts
> wikiproject, comparing the chaos of wiki communities and documentation
> to that of the blogging world pre-Movable Type.  He shopped around for
> a wiki to use for an educational project (which was inspired by
> WikiPedia, retro camel caps and all), and finally settled on MediaWiki
> as the best choice.  Unfortunately, its "scattered and obtuse"
> documentation, "stupidly difficult" customizations, and lack of an
> off-wiki user manual,  left him cold.  He notes he'd be willing to pay
>  on the order of $100 for an actively developed, well-supported
> solution.

I'll use this as an opportunity to promote again the help effort on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents

This is really something every user can help with. There are now several  
services which offer free print-on-demand books in the style Cafepress  
offers t-shirts (in fact, Cafepress is one of them). So it should not be  
too hard to create a printed manual for MediaWiki.

I wonder whether we need something like [[en:Wikipedia:Collaboration of  
the Week]] for the whole Wikimedia community, where the current WMCOTW  
would be visibly promoted on all projects. This could help in jumpstarting  
things like translation, transwiki, new project proposals, embassies, etc.

Regards,

Erik